The drive alone threatened to defeat me. I should have taken some other random route, even if it took longer. To trick my body into believing we were headed someplace else. Every few miles a memory broke like an egg on my face. Cumberland Gap, our bathroom stop on the trip to Aunt June’s where I was uninvited and smelled bad. Gibson Station, where Mrs. McCobb made me try to pawn dirty Barbies and a used toaster with black crumbs in it. Cedar Hill, where I believed my childhood hero had bought his own farm, prior to learning he was a liar. Prior to seeing his skull broken open. I was processing my traumas, like they say. Lately I’d cut my smoking back to negligible, just poker nights and blue rainy days. The occasional walk home from the library after Lyra was overly frisky. Okay but now I was chain-smoking in the car.
On the outskirts of Pennington I passed the dead strip mall and former pill mill of Watts that I knew was shut down. June had told me the soulless pervert got his due, federal charges pending. This was the year of trials starting to go to the top, the oxy tides turning. Angus said even people in Nashville were talking about oxy now, but in comic-book terms only, evil corporate villains. No mention of all the little people scorched but staving off their living death thanks to places like that pill mill, buying and selling in the parking lot. I thought of my old reliable buyers. The guy with his walker and fur-flap hunting hat, the sad fat lady with her Chihuahua. How the hell were they getting by now? According to June, the recovery enterprise of Lee County was still limited mainly to church life groups, Grapevine magazine, and basement twelve-step meetings. It was best not to get her started on the subject. These megabuck settlements against Purdue, and not a dime of it ever getting back here.
Annie was set on me staying over with them, so she could lay out all my High Ground drawings on her kitchen table. I had a breakfast date with June the next morning. Otherwise, no strategy. I’d had vague thoughts of meeting up with friends, but turning that into a plan moved in the direction of what Dr. Andresen called suicidal ideation. Going to the Five Star Stadium on Friday for Coach’s thing, seriously? Every person there would try to sell me dope, unless they loved me and gave it to me for free. Everything about that place was a trigger. Yard lines, goalposts, the chutes that were my superpower. The place where I’d made and lost my fortune.
I passed kudzu valley and the Powell River and the mountain that doesn’t really look like a face. All of it a little homely in the dead of winter, but in that ugly-duckling way that you knew would turn around. The caboose in front of the middle school, the bric-a-brac mammaw yards. I saw people on porches, but my eyes shied away as they’d learned to do. Saving my juice. If it had been July, my heart already would have cracked for the beauty. As it was, I might die of loneliness. How could I be here with all these familiar things but not the people that looked me in the eye and called me brother, or God love ya, or You’re that one, or Honey I remember you from the feed store. To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn’t that, it’s nothing.
Annie’s house was no trouble to find. I was a little surprised every time the Beretta took a turn the right way, like it was the Impala and not me that had known these roads blindfolded. I knocked on the blue front door, and heard Hazel Dickens running around in there yapping. Nobody came. I opened the door and yelled hello. Hazel Dickens sat down and looked at me. I closed the door and knocked again. All this before I saw the note stuck to the doorbell: Gone to the hospital, sorry. Might be a false alarm. Lewis will call you. Make yourself at home.
And it sank in: they were having a freaking baby. I thought of the McCobb twins, the all-night wailing, the casual flopping out of tits. I seriously doubted Annie knew what she was in for. These people did not need me or my box of drawings in their hair at this time. I called June. She had patients and a staff meeting and after that some meeting at the health department, but said I was welcome. Take Emmy’s old room. She’d see me, if not tonight then in the morning.
So I was cut loose without a safety net. I had no intention of sitting all day at June’s. I gave the Beretta free rein and we wandered aimlessly. It was an in-your-face winter’s day, so bright. I drove to the river bridge where I used to fish with Mr. Peg. Watched the glittery water till I had to drive on. Went to Hoboland and sat looking up the skirts of those hemlocks, thinking of Angus lying back on her elbows, seeing straight into me. I had to get up and leave. The sun shellacked a shine on the houses and mailboxes. Everything I looked at made my eyes water. It felt like being in love with somebody that’s married. I could never have this. Staying here, alone and sober, was beyond my powers. And I still wanted it with all my hungry parts.
I stuck to the lonelier roads, and really couldn’t tell you my thought processes, if any, but I ended up at the trail to Devil’s Bathtub. Was it a Step 4 type thing, courage and moral inventory? I doubt it sincerely. More like picking a fight with a person you’re ready to break up with. I needed to find the place that would make me hate it here and not come back.
The gravel lot had one other car, so. Still open to the public. Two more fatalities wouldn’t shut the place down, given the long history of youthful male recklessness. And girls wrecked too. I’d never thought of that before, not once. Mom was here. Walking the same trail as me. Watching what I watched and worse, the end of the man she loved. His body. I felt a little shaky as I locked my car, with nothing valuable in it but my box of drawings in the trunk. City habits.
Devil’s Bathtub turned out to be the first place I’d been all day that wasn’t laid with mines. I recognized nothing. The trail was bone dry, the creek was easy to cross on stepping stones with white rugs of dried-up algae. I didn’t get my shoes wet. The air smelled like sweet apples and something else, Pine-Sol or medicine. Little trees alongside of the trail were covered with brushy yellow flowers. Witch hazel, that blooms in winter. Mrs. Peggot used to make a salve of that and put it on our scrapes. All that just hit me, from the smell. Now the bees were all over it, rousted out from their winter nap, filling up the quietness with their buzz.